Eerily Relevant Mark Twain Quotes About America

  

(1)

'Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.'

 

 

 

(2)

'God created war so that Americans would learn geography.'

 

 (3)

 'Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.'

(4)

'Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently;they read its literature, but not that of the other side.'

 (5)

 'It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.'

(6) 

'...it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.' 

 

(7)
'A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe; but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.'

 

(8)

 'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.'

(9)

'We have the best government that money can buy'

 (10)

 'In America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!'

(11) 

'If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.'